Last week’s announcement of the proposed merger of the two seemingly failing satellite radio companies XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio has created a lot of excitement but also a sort of active stand-offishness among those who believe satellite radio is a doomed and soon to be irrelevant enterprise anyway. The reason for the irrelevance is that some day soon - real soon (maybe) - we’ll all be able to listen to any radio station through wireless internet connections. Wireless over the wireless? Let’s call it WiSquared!

There’s little doubt we will one day see at least an version of unlimited radio delivered wirelessly, but we’re definitely not there yet, and probably won’t be for years to come. There are at a minimum two things missing right now: Adequate wirelss Internet coverage and Internet radio receivers.

So for the time being satellite radio is the name of the game for coast-to-coast radio.

And that is quite frankly not much of a game. more accurately, it’s a game for not that many participants. For $13 a month plus the cost of the receiver (which can easily run into hundreds of dollars) you get a wide choice of things that mostly won’t interest you and for which there are cheaper and/or more portable substitutes.

If you like to listen to music that you’ll rarely hear on terrestrial radio, or if you desire music of any kind without commercial and other interruptions, you can always go with a compact disc or some MP3 player. You can usually tune in some kind of news cast on groundbound radio, almost no matter where you are (and where you can’t you probably won’t find yourself very often).

Satellite radio has a fairly weak value proposition, even if the “premium brand” and “original content” programming for which XM and Sirius has paid so dearly are taken into account. I imagine it is easy for many, and perhaps most satellite radio subscribers to drop their subscriptions after a year or two, when the novelty has worn off.

Things could have been different had either of the two companies hit the market hard with a portable receiver for $50-$100 and a monthly plan for as little six or seven bucks a month. An marketing assault of that kind might have spurred a wider adoption of satellite radio, and, consequently, a much greater social relevance than it has today.

But even in that scenario, which sounds like science-fiction compared to how XM and Sirius actually rolled out their products, satellite radio would have amounted to little more than regular radio, upgraded at a cost. It’s just not a compelling offer, especially when other new media bills are to be paid, such as cell phones, Internet access, cable, iTunes downloads, Netflix etc.

A reliable satellite service that reliably provided phone service and always-on two-way Internet access at a reasonable price, now that would be would be worth cellphone money.

Critics love it, so it is perhaps no wonder that “Friday Night Lights,” the TV-show that was spwaned from a movie that was spawned from a book, is faltering, flailing and probably dying in the ratings. The viewers just aren’t there.

I can’t say I’m all that surprised. The problem with a football show is that its natural audience, guys who watch football, would rather watch football than a show about football. That makes scheduling alone a hassle: College football takes up all of Saturday, NFL all of Sunday, Monday nights are occupied by, yes, Monday Night Football, then college football returns on Thursday night and on Friday night there’s high school football all across America, and even more college football on TV. That leaves Tuesday and Wednesday. That is not a large window of opportunity.

However, network shows aren’t made for men but for women, which means “Friday Night Lights” the TV-show is heavy on relationships and what we can call issues - and there goes the guys who like watching football. Of course, many women hate football since football is the married woman’s main competitor when it comes to making claims on a husband’s time. What you end up with is a show that can’t appeal to its superficially natural audience and won’t appeal to its actual potential audience.

And then there’s the basic trap of any show or movie: The Hero who is similar to so many writers, only more athletic. Contra Costa Times‘ TV critic Chuck Barney gives the game away in a piece where he’s begging his readers to watch the fundamentally flawed show:

Exalted quarterback Jason Street (Scott Porter), a young man with an arm forged by the gridiron gods, suffered a paralyzing injury in the season-opener. Now, longtime bench-warmer Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), a shy, bookish young man, is struggling in his stead.

Peyton Manning, Donovan McNabb, Ben Roethlisberger, Tom Brady… all shy, bookish men.

While the ratings for whichever evening news show Katie Couric hosts has dropped, the fall hasn’t been nearly as dramatic as the one the XFL experienced. So while the ill-fated league started out stronger, Ms. Couric has better legs. But we already knew that.

While Wal-Mart is often seen s as unstoppable retail-juggernaut, same-stores sales-growth has actually slowed dramatically for the Arkansas-based company over the past few years and is now hovering around 3%, down from 9% in 1999.

Eduardo Castro-Wright, the Chief Executive Officer of Wal-Mart’s U.S. stores has designed a new strategy to boost sales growth. Mr. Castro-Wright wants each of the company’s approximately 3,400 stores to server one of six segments, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal (”To Boost Sales, Wal-Mart Drops OIne-Size-Fits-All Approach” September 7, 2006). The segments are:

- Affluent
- Empty-Nesters
- Suburbanites
- Rural
- Hispanics
- African-Americans

The segmentation strategy is a deprature from the company’s current practice of stocking all stores pretty much the same way, and luring customers with the same low-cost approach.

The rural stores make up about half of Wal-Mart’s U.S. stores.

An example of how Wal-Mart is trying to snag higher-end customers is it promotional tie-in with Monday Night Football on ESPN, where it will pitch high-definition plasma TVs this fall.

Whites make up about 67% of the U.S. population, Hispanics 14%, and African-Americans 12%.

While Wal-Mart is trying to better serve different customer groups, and snag more affluent or hip shoppers who now snub it in favor of Target (which really is like a Wal-Mart with brighter colors and wider smiles) it also wants to remain the low-cost store of choice, as Mr. Castro-Wright made clear at a presentation to analysts at a Goldman-Sachs conference, according to CNN Money:

Wal-Mart is preparing to go deeper with discounts in a bid to boost customer traffic and offset lost sales as higher gas prices force its core low-income shoppers to cut back, Wal-Mart CEO Eduardo Castro-Wright told an industry gathering Thursday.

“We’ve reenergized our rollback program to convince consumers that the smart thing is to go to Wal-Mart and save more.”

…

He added that the move was in response to Wal-Mart’s (Charts) own market research, which evaluated its customers’ exposure to gas prices and asked what “we could do to help make it worthwhile for shoppers to make the additional two to three mile trip to our stores.”

He said the recent run-up in fuel prices was changing the way Wal-Mart customers shopped. “They’re cutting down on the number of trips to Wal-Mart stores and stocking up on weekends.”

Katie Couric’s debut show with CBS News recorded a 9.1 Nielsen rating. By comparison, the XFL’s first game on NBC scored a 9.5 rating.

Just saying.

In today’s Washington Post, columnist Anne Appelbaum contrasts the pathetic lies of James Frey - whose fabricated “memoir” has become a major embarrassment for Oprah Winfrey, the high-priestess of self-obessed emoting - with the pathetic lies of Lillian Hellman who in 1973 published her supposed memoir Pentimento, in which the author cast herself as heroic anti-Nazi fighter.

Appelbaum’s compares Frey’s made-up lie of victimhood to other recent faux memoirs whose writers created tear-jerking stories of personal hardship:

These fabricators reinvent themselves not as heroes but as victims, a status they sometimes attain by changing their ethnicity. Among them are Bruno Grosjean, aka Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose touching, prize-winning, “autobiographical” tale of a childhood spent in the Majdanek concentration camp turned out to be the fantasy of the adopted son of a wealthy Swiss couple. Another was Helen Darville, aka Helen Demidenko, whose touching, prize-winning “autobiographical” tale of a Ukrainian girl whose father was a former SS officer turned out to be the fantasy of a middle-class British girl living in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia.

And the trend continues: In the past few days, yet another prize-winning author, who calls himself “Nasdijj” and claims to be the son of a violent cowboy and an alcoholic Native American woman (and who, as a child was “hungry, raped, beaten, whipped and forced at every opportunity to work in the fields,” he told an interviewer) — has also been “outed” as a white writer of erotica named Timothy Barrus.

A parallel development is the absence of real-life military heroes in public life. Event though many have been minted in the our current wars overseas, none of them have been embraced much by the wider public, and certainly none of them has become a household name. They aren’t invited to latenight talk shows to discuss what they did and why, and they aren’t held up as role models.

To be more specific: Sales of these faux memoirs are driven by women. Why is it that women prefer lies about pretend bums over true stories about knights in (metaphorically speaking) shining armor?

By leading the New England Patriots to three Super Bowl victories in four years (2001, 2003, 2004) Bill Belichick has established himself as one of the greatest coaches in the history in the National Football League, and his team’s recent loss to the Denver Broncos doesn’t change that, especially since it was the players who fouled up, rather than Belichick.

Belichick is at least superficially quite unlike most of the great NFL coaches. He keeps everything close to the vest, he puts great emphasis on team work and dicourages star systems. He is not an emotional or charismatic leader, but rather a planner, scouter, schemer, and, above all, teacher. He wins through exhaustive preparation and meticulous execution. He isn’t married to any particular system or philosophy, but instead will devise whatever combination of formations and plays necessary to win any given game.

Needless to say, none of that is half as important as the fact that he won three Super Bowls in four years, and with today’s celebrity culture (which puts the ‘cult’ in culture) and a publishing industry that is always on the prowl for a sure thing, it is remarkable that Belichick hasn’t spawned a small industry of how-to-succeed books. Instead of adding his name to slap-dash hagiographies, Belichick has limited his book-industry foray to giving access to Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam of The Best and the Brightest fame. In turn, Halberstam’s book, The Education of a Coach, focuses less on Bill Belichick’s many recent successes and more on the process that led him to them.

That process begins with Belichik’s grandparents who in 1897 moved to America from Croatia, then a part of the slowly decaying Habsburg Empire, which finally imploded during World War I. Belichick’s grandfather was an illiterate, but a man of tremendous work ethic. He ended up in the heart of the Ellis Island-era immigration experience: The steel mill and coal mine towns of western Pennsylvania and central and eastern Ohio, where football quickly, almost instantly, became an ecumenical church of sorts for people from all over Europe who were trying to find their way in an unforgiving but promising land, a time and place captured so well by James Wright’s poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

The Ohio - Pennsylvania axis of football excellence is an important piece of America’s identity, a shining example of toughness, can do-ism, and assimilation. It is fitting that the latest, and maybe greatest, of football’s masters can trace his American roots to that region.

Halberstam’s book on Bill Belichick is not great, but it is good and it offers a detailed description of how Belichick was molded, what people and institutions molded him and how. The book has received a lot of praise, and I would say that all of it is deserved.

However, it is somewhat surprising that one little aspect of the book has gone, as far as I can tell, unnoticed by the media. In chapter two, Halberstam writes the following:

The entire region of western Pennsylvania and eastern and central Ohio was great football country, both high school and college football. Everyone seemed to care passionately about the game. This was, after all, a part of the country where tough men endured great physical hardship to earn a living - only the strong succeeded, and not surprisingly, they produced big, strong, athletically gifted children who had no fear of ferocious physical contact - indeed, they seemed to relish it. In the era before the coming of the great black athletes, when power was blended with speed and game stayed just as physical but got a lot faster, no area produced as many great football players or as many distinguished coaches as this region.

Compare that to the, reputedly drunken, outburst that cost Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder his job at CBS in 1988:

“During the slave period, the slave owner would breed his big black with his big woman so that he would have a big black kid—that’s where it all started.”

Essentially, Halberstam makes the same argument, only about ethnic Whites rather than African-Americans.

…our retail-sales reps had some problems last year. Jill in Accounting - wow, did she ever have a brutal third quarter or what? I’m not taking anything away from our competitors, they really out did us with excellent customer service and superior products, but, yes, we did have some problems in our warehouses. When we landed the General Widgets contract, that was definitely big, I put in a coupe of key phone calls to some movers and shakers over there at GW, that really helped our numbers, but we just couldn’t over come the slow first quarter, the even worse second quarter, the all but disastrous third quarter, even though the fourth quarter worked out very well, I mean it wasn’t enough, and I don’t think it’s fair to say that Sally at Inhouse Sales should be the only one to get the blame for that, but it just didn’t work out for us. You know, I’m passionate about what we do, and we didn’t fail because I didn’t work real hard, I can tell you that, but, yes, it’s true, Andy over at HR underestimated our staffing needs.

(Inspired, of course, by everybody’s inspirational leader Peyton Manning)

Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch let’s off a gigantic oestrogen bomb in his “My television wish list” piece on SI.com’s Scorecard Daily section. In a list if 10 things he would like to see on sports television this year he includes this bizarre suggestion:

ESPN should create a female version of The Sports Reporters… why not develop a half-hour show featuring both ESPN and female sports journalists from around the country debating the sports issues of the week? Talent isn’t an issue. There are hundreds of women in various mediums who provide sports content on a daily basis… I guarantee such a show will get better ratings than ESPN Hollywood. Why? Because men will actually tune in, for starters.

Does Deitsch watch The View a lot? I rather doubt it, and I seriously doubt that a lot of men would tune in to see what a bunch of women with an unusual interest in competitive team sports have to say about the Yankees newest batter or the Arizona Cardinals’ draft picks or what have you.

Not that it really matters a heck of a lot what kind of prattle-shows ESPN puts on. I can’t imagine that many people watch the turgid all-male “The Sports Reporters” to begin with. But Deitsch has an even worse idea:

Networks should aim to break the play-by-play gender barrier

Dietsch is “stopped cold” by the fact that “[n]o network is using a woman in the booth for the NFL, NBA, NHL or Major League Baseball.” Personally, I’m stopped cold by Pam Ward calling a college football game. Luckily, there’s almost always a half-dozen or so other college games to choose from on my cable system, and it would be really nice if things stayed that way.

Finally, Dietsch wants NBC to “flood the zone” with the Olympic Games in Turin.

[W]ith no ready-made television superstar heading into Turin (I’d bet even money that eight out of 10 Americans would not recognize Bode Miller or Daron Rahlves on the street), the TV public is going to need a major primer on the likes of Lindsey Kildow, Chad Hedrick and Catherine Raney. So unleash the hounds, Mr. Ebersol. As the the Lord of the rings in this country, NBC controls the volume on the hype of an Olympic Games.

For some reason I just don’t feel a need for a “major primer” on the likes of Mr. Hedrick and Ms. Raney. What I would like NBC to do is to show more college football. Sans female commentators.

Update: Chris Chase agrees that female play-by-players just don’t make sense:

[I]t just doesn’t work. Pam Ward isn’t terrible on ESPN, but she’s totally unwatchable. Meanwhile, Kenny Albert is terrible on FOX, but I don’t change the channel just because of him. I had to actually stop watching a Maryland football game earlier this season because I couldn’t listen to Pam Ward’s voice. It’s irritating. It’s out of place. It’s just not right.

Nice, decent, educated, sensitive people take exception to the old “Merry Christmas” greeting since some people - very few in America, mind you - don’t celebrate Christmas and hence might be offended by such a well wishing.

Yet I don’t know of anybody who holds back on hearty “Happy New Year” exclamations for fear of offending somebody who might recognize a different date as the first day of the year - as Chinese and Muslims do.

The discrepancy is telling. The anti-Merry Christmas faction isn’t afraid of “offending” people, its mebers most likely want to offend and their targets are Christians.

On that note, have a Happy New Year and welcome to 2006!